It was ‘the knife of the long knight’, joked one social media wag about the bid by the unfeasibly tall Sir Simon Clarke to oust Rishi Sunak from 10 Downing Street. So lanky was he as a youth that Clarke was nicknamed ‘stilts’ in his schooldays. Conventional wisdom at Westminster will tell you this morning that his attempted coup is nonsense on stilts as well. Certainly, there has thus far been a notable lack of colleagues replicating his call for Sunak to stand down.

And yet, in recent years Westminster conventional wisdom has often got things wrong. Just because there is no sign of Clarke’s media-based revolt catching fire right now, even among the small group of Tory MPs who joined him in voting against Sunak’s legislation on Rwanda last week, it does not follow that it will have no impact.

Sunak is obviously not the Tory best-placed to fend off the Farage-ist threat on the Tory right-flank

Some observers have already spotted a curiosity in the article in the Daily Telegraph at the heart of his onslaught. He refers in it to that newspaper having run a devastating mega-poll ‘in January’. Does this not imply that Clarke wrote his article with a view to running it in February? To me it seems like that.

That might well have been a better idea, despite some more notably poor opinion polls in the last few days and fresh data from that mega-survey purporting to illustrate the prospect of recovery under a better leader. Mid-February sees another double by-election day in two seats the Conservatives currently hold. This time around there is a strong chance that electors in Wellingborough and Kingswood will not only return Labour MPs but also do something Tory parliamentarians will find even more unnerving: give the Reform UK party significant electoral traction for the first time.

Sir Simon’s warning of an impending general election ‘massacre’ will gain substance if Reform can turn opinion poll ratings of ten per cent or more into vote shares that match or exceed that in real contests. In those circumstances the name of Nigel Farage will start getting recited in much the way that Napoleon Boneparte’s was used by parents to frighten children in southern England early in the 19th century.

As the epitome of a conventional, establishment-minded, ‘art of the possible’ politician, Sunak is obviously not the Tory best-placed to fend off the Farage-ist threat on the Tory right-flank. So the more the threat grows, the stronger the case that going through the pain of replacing him will be worthwhile. Improved Tory opinion poll ratings and a smaller swing to Labour in the by-elections than has recently been seen would, on the other hand, calm nerves among Conservative MPs. But there seems little prospect of that.

Why Clarke went early is a puzzle. Some are speculating that the powers-that-be at the Telegraph wanted to be seen to be making a political splash given an imminent ministerial decision on whether to allow their media group to be sold to a foreign government. Others point to the idea of there being a ‘rolling coup’ involving figures close to Boris Johnson and to former home secretary Suella Braverman.

It could be that in three weeks or so, Downing Street’s best argument against yet another leadership change is that it would be economically destabilising, risking another spike in borrowing costs of the sort that so damaged the Tories in the eyes of the electorate at the time of the Liz Truss era mini-Budget.

In the meantime, Sunak must get through another bruising Prime Minister’s Questions today at which Keir Starmer will surely revel in his discomfort and invite the British public to view him as a chump and a loser. There may have been only one knife going into his back last night, but for Rishi Sunak the risk of death by a thousand cuts in the coming weeks is still very real.